A tragic consequence of Facebook ‘celebrity culture’

Jack Renshaw (right) with fellow Young BNP official Jack Buckby. Mr Renshaw is now beginning a life sentence in prison for ‘terrorist’ offences; Mr Buckby (who left the BNP in 2013) is now an author and online commentator.

Yesterday Jack Renshaw, a former Young BNP leader, was given a life sentence at the Old Bailey with the recommendation that he should serve at least twenty years.

This was the highest profile case in a series of investigations into National Action, a national-socialist youth group that was banned in December 2016 under the Terrorism Act – the first proscription of a ‘far right’ movement in the UK since 1940.

Despite several attempts, no court has so far accepted the fantasy view of National Action – propagated by the authorities and Hope not Hate – as a sinister terrorist conspiracy. Juries repeatedly rejected the evidence of Hope not Hate whistleblower Robbie Mullen and other state witnesses, and refused to convict any defendants for terrorist conspiracies.

Jack Renshaw was convicted for what seem to have been wholly foolish and impractical statements (made while drunk) that he was going to kill an MP and a policewoman. No ‘conspiracy’ was entered into to bring this about and no feasible murder plan was prepared.

The Labour MP at the centre of the case was so upset by these verdicts that she proposed changing the law so that terrorism trials could be held without juries, presumably then bringing in the ‘correct’ verdicts! However this aspect of the case is now being swept under the carpet, as Hope not Hate and its allies pretend that the National Action terrorism trials have been some sort of great victory for ‘anti-fascism’.

What the whole affair does demonstrate is the danger of “social media culture”.

National Action emerged in 2013 with a mission to liven up the racial nationalist scene. Not only electoral politics but the entire leadership cadre of the movement – from the NF to London Forum to (no doubt) H&D – was dismissed as fuddy-duddy failures whose time had passed.

No doubt there was some truth in this, and if NA had stuck to livening up our movement’s online presentation, and staging occasional headline-grabbing street activities, their contribution would have been welcome.

Unfortunately hubris (and inevitable nemesis) supervened.

Social media demands that racial nationalists become ever more ‘extreme’ in their language and presentation in order to grab attention. This type of ‘extremism’ doesn’t necessarily mean a radical ideology. A good example is Carl Benjamin, aka ‘Sargon of Akkad’. His ‘jokes’ about raping Labour MP Jess Phillips were just the sort of thing that guaranteed success on Facebook or YouTube. Yet in the serious world of electoral politics – as opposed to the lucrative but essentially unserious world of Facebook likes and monetised YouTube videos – Mr Benjamin’s language proved toxic. His candidature is one more albatross round the neck of a dying UKIP.

Other YouTubers have corrupted historical revisionism by associating this method of serious historical enquiry with crudely offensive attacks on Jews.

And inevitably the National Action approach degenerated from deliberately provocative language, to an apocalyptic conspiratorial worldview accompanied by foolish talk about political violence.

Those who engaged in such talk had no actual experience of political violence. For example they had no connection at all with the Loyalist movement in Ulster, where during the past fifty years numerous racial nationalists from mainland Britain have allied with our Ulster brothers in fighting back against the IRA’s murderous terror gangs.

In fact NA was conspicuously opposed to Ulster Loyalism. Those of us with Loyalist friends were dismissed as part of yesterday’s failed leadership.

Yet despite being essentially unreal, National Action’s keyboard terrorism has resulted in savage sentences.

H&D readers will have the greatest sympathy with the victims of our politicised justice system. Yet we must make clear not only that political violence is foolish and unjustified in a British context, but also that “big talk” on social media is the start of a road to perdition.

It starts with wanting to big-note yourself online, to be more outrageous than anyone else, to be fashionably ‘edgy’. It ends with wasting at least twenty years of your life locked up as a convicted ‘terrorist’.

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  1. […] them for the first time, will gain political succour and inspiration and avoid the pitfalls of faulty analysis and false gods that has plagued previous efforts to build a self-sustaining nationalist movement across this […]



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